fishydreams

I spent last week with a group of school kids and a few colleagues in Doñana which, if you are not familiar with it, is an important National Park in Huelva Province on Spain´s southern Atlantic coast. Doñana is particularly famous for the population of Iberian Lynx which thrive there and a breeding centre located here has been instrumental in bringing these endangered felines back from the brink of extinction.

On the second day of our visit we all, students and teachers alike, took the opportunity to take a trek on horseback. I do not teach the students I accompanied on this particular trip and so they do not know me well and have not had a chance to learn that I will often engage in telling tall tales and am particularly prone to dreaming up all kinds of preposterous nonsense to see if they are naive enough to believe me. This is a service I offer, free of charge, in the hope that the youngsters eventually develop a healthy degree of cynicism. Having all kinds of boloney dispensed by people who earnestly look them in the eye is a fate awaiting all of them and nobody wants them becoming suckers for the spiels of snake oil salesmen, politicians or religious zealots. That might be a laudable outcome but, truthfully, I am pulling your leg too. I engage in this kind of nonsense primarily to amuse myself and see what I can get away with.

On the walk to the paddock I got talking to some of the kids and the exchange went something like this……

Kid: Sir, have you ridden on a horse before?

Mr Hogan: Funny you should ask that! I actually come from a circus family and, when I was about your age, I was in charge of looking after the horses that were part of our family´s act. My job was to feed them and muck them out but in the act I would ride two horses at the same time while standing up and steering them with my feet.

Kid: Really? Could you really do that?

Mr Hogan: Yes, but I doubt that I could do it now. Riding two horses at the same time was difficult but it was just a question of practice. The most challenging thing was juggling at the same time!

When we arrived at the paddock, the horse people divided us into the groups of experienced riders and beginners and I meekly sidled into the group that, frankly, didn´t know one end of a horse from the other. This was unfortunate as it blew my cover as a circus performing wunder-kid.

Of course the horse people in the paddock knew all about horses, not only did they know which end was the front of each horse and which end was the back but, of course they knew the horses individually and could, in a split second, look at a person and size up the horse that they would be well matched with. They didn´t know our names so they would just point at each of us and give us the name of our horse. Nearly all the horses had cool names; Imperador, India, Andaluz, Avalon, Famoso, Aurelio, Paloma, Cosmos.

When my turn came they looked at me for a nanosecond and matched me with a horse called Bambi.

Bambi!

Anyway, enough of this nonsense of me and kids and the horses! There are a lot more interesting things to say about the horses from this part of the world. Famously, horses from Huelva were the first to be introduced to the New World. Iberian horses were first brought to  Hispaniola and later to Panama, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and, in 1538, Florida. The first horses on the mainland were 16 individuals brought by Hernán Cortéz in 1519.

The “introduction” of horses to the New World following Columbus´s “discovery” (tell that to the native Americans!) is a little misleading because, while it is true that they had been absent at the time of Columbus´arrival, horses had been present in the Americas until relatively recent times before they became extinct. There are different ideas about what the reason might be for their extinction. There was a climate change event going on around this time but my money is on the theory that it was recently arrived humans that delivered the coup de grâce and the dates seem to coincide. Unfortunately, we human beings have form here. There are many “megafaunal” extinction events that took place as our ancestors appeared in various parts of the world.

I learned during our visit, that wild American mustangs are descended from the hardy wild horses that today can be found in the marshes within the National Park of Doñana. These horses, “caballos marismeños”, wander freely around the marshes but, interestingly, they have owners and, once every year, horsemen enter the marshes, separate the mares and foals from the stallions, and then drive them from the marshes. They they may be branded and checked over by vets but a major role of this activity, which is called “Saca de las Yeguas” is to control the population and maintaining it within the carrying capacity of the environment. This annual event takes place on the June 26, just a few days ago, and is a famous spectacle. Following these events the horses are returned to the marshes for another year when they are free to wander around and do as they please.

The horses driven from the marshes go to the town of Almonte but they also pass through the town of El Rocío, which has an extraordinary association with horses. In this town the streets are unpaved and sandy for the benefit of horses and there is a real “western” feel. I have visited this town and this National Park many times now and it is just another of those many places in Spain that locally famous but not well known beyond this extraordinary country.

To give an idea of what the Saca de las Yeguas looks like I attach below a couple of pictures that I have shamelessly pilfered from Wikipedia, which I should also acknowledge for its account of the history of horses in the New World.

During this part of the “saca de las yeguas” the mares and foals are being driven through the town of El Rocío